Telefundraising and Text Message fundraising (Strategies and Tips)

August 22, 2018 - 8 minutes read

The texts I get from Divya at the Clean Lakes initiative in my city always get me to reply. I get the occasional impersonal reminder a day before a cleaning drive, but other than that it’s almost always a personal text that feels like something a friend would send.

“Hi Tony, this is Divya from the Clean Lakes initiative. We’re launching the Conserve An Acre program today that will fund conservation practices on farmlands. Are you interested in helping out?”

“Sure😃”

“Awesome! You can read more about the program here👉bit.ly/2Moybm5. Even $1 goes a long way to help keep our waterways clean. You can make the donation here bit.ly/2Moybm5.”

“Done. Good luck with your work.”

“🎉Thank you! Have a good day.”

People donate when they can empathize with a cause. With small donors (like me), text messages offer the perfect channel for real conversations that can nurture that empathy. Forbigger donors, live phone calls take the cake next to actually meeting people on the doorstep. With either strategy, the back and forth involved in the conversation forges a strong connection that gets people invested in your cause.

In this article, we look at how phone calls and text messages form the perfect blend to get your fundraising message across and raise funds for your organization or political campaign.

Telephone Fundraising VS Text Message Fundraising

Telefundraising is a fundraising strategy that involves the use of live callers who personally call up prospective donors to solicit donations. Donations are collected through pledges, by collecting their credit card information on the call, or by navigating them to the campaign website where they can make the donation.

Text Message Fundraising uses interactive text messages that are part of an automated campaign, or one-to-one conversations where a live agent interacts with the prospective donor to collect donations. Donors are guided to a mobile-friendly page on the campaign website where they can make the donation.

When you’re dealing with a large voter list or supporter lists that haven’t gone through finer vetting, it’s not feasible to make phone calls to each and every one on your list to convey the campaign message and ask for donations. That’s where text messages come in handy to let you scale up your outreach, collect data and raise funds. Based on the datafrom your texting campaigns you can identify your strong supporters and then tailor your list for future telefundraising efforts.

For high value donors, phone calls as part of phonathons are a great way to cement your relationship with a prospective donor. Added with the data collection, targeting, and analytics available to you within CallHub, your telefundraising campaigns are optimized for the best results.

Personalization

When it is a matter of donating money, it is essential to nurture trust with people. CallHub lets your bring in every small detail about your contacts so agents can access the information when they are calling or texting contacts.Details about whether the contact has donated before, their interests and supporter levels are all accessible to your agents. Agents also have context for each conversation through a timeline that shows detailed history of all engagement.

While telephone fundraising, your agents can use this information to personalize live calls. The process is even easier with Collective Texting campaigns where each text is automatically personalized.We wrote an in-depth guide on how to run personalized fundraising campaigns using text messages. Check it out here.

Data Sharing

A single channel strategy is not an efficient strategy. You’re using multiple tools throughout your engagement process; sending out emails, uploading data to your CRM, social media engagement and more. But when these tools exist in silos, it becomes difficult toapply learnings from one channel to other. And these informed decisions are necessary to run effective telephone and text fundraising programs. CallHub integrations make sure that you can seamlessly bring in data from your donor database and have any datacollected via CallHub instantly sync with the database. Did a contact agree to donate $100? An agent simply marks the detail in survey forms within CallHub to have it instantly appear within the donor profile in your CRM.

Segmentation and Targeting

DAY 1: You call a contact. They agree to donate.

DAY 7: You call the same contact with the same ask. You’re in trouble.

That’s why CallHub lets you segment every calling and texting campaign so you always reach the right people. Future fundraising campaigns can be informed based on data collected from previous outreach so agents always know every small detail about who they’re talking to. And that means they won’t be making the same ask to the same donor twice in the span of a week.

Scalability

“Hi Jon, this is Melinda from Hope Society. We’ve almost reached our fundraising goal of $10,000 to support the Clean Energy bill. Can you pitch in another $25 to get us over the edge?”

What if you could have 1500 of these conversations in the span of an hour?

Collective Texting,CallHub’s peer to peer texting toollets your agents send more than 1500 texts in the span of an hour and nurture conversations that lead to a donation.

With telephone fundraising, the cloud platform ensures that you can scale up your outreach without encountering any hassles. You also have the pay as you go pricing model to ensure that you only pay for the calls you make (that means none of those monthly subscriptions).

Fundraising is tough business. People don’t part easily with their hard earned dollars…unless you can get them invested in your cause. CallHub is designed to ensure that fundraisers have all the tools they need to forge strong relationships with the right people.

Tony works on stories at CallHub, where the customer is the protagonist and the setting changes across politics, advocacy and business. He shapes and builds the story arc to help them overcome conflict, be it to mobilize supporters across the nation, assess voter sentiment or get citizens out to vote. That involves crafting content that is visually and textually engaging, making sure that it reaches the right audience and building a brand that customers trust in to achieve their goals.

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